Thursday, July 31, 2008

EMBASSY ELECTRICAL SUPPLIES & COFFEE CAFE: TWO TREATS ON COMPTON ST

A little over a year ago, I posted about Embassy Electrical Supplies, a small shop on Compton St, where, alongside fuses, wires and plugs for Clerkenwell’s handymen, Memhet Murat sells olive oil sourced from his own groves in Turkey and Cyprus. It is some of the best I have tasted in a long time, fresh and green, just the way I like it.

I popped in to see Memhet again earlier this week and came away with a bottle of his latest Turkish oil and a bottle of his Cypriot oil along with some rather lovely olives, which he recommended I rinse, drizzle with oil, lemon juice and a few chilli flakes.

It is people like Memhet who are the real food heroes of the U.K, unassuming, and dedicated to producing the best oils and olives he can, it is impossible to leave the shop without being given a taste of everything and almost as impossible to get him to take money from you. Well worth a visit.

Further along Compton St, towards The Goswell Road, is another unassuming little treasure. The Coffee Café may look like A N Other Sandwich shop, but one glimpse at their blackboard shows you that all is not as it seems. The owner is from Sao Paulo and, as well as offering the usual “something in a toasted ciabatta” The Coffee Café serves Brazilian pastries, a wide range of Brazilian juices and a very passable stab at a fejoida.

This being Clerkenwell, the only slaves are of the middle class wage kind, so the fejoida is lacking in the hooves, lips and assholes of the original dish and it needed the added punch of hot pepper sauce from a bottle on the table. But, it has the correct beans plumped out with meaty chunks of pork and bacon in a suitably rich sauce. It comes with rice, greens and farofa, toasted matioc flour, and for £4.50 is very good value for money particularly when, after ingesting all those carbs, supper will be unnecessary.

With a tall glass of Surinam cherry juice and a tip, the bill was £7 including a bottle of water.

Places like Embassy Electrical Supplies and Coffee Café are well worth supporting. Honest and good value for money, which in these times of credit crunch is all too rare.

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